How will the BBC detect people watching iPlayer without a licence?

As of September, you will need a TV licence to use the iPlayer, and the BBC has already had to deny that it plans to snoop on private Wi-Fi networks to catch non-payers – there are better, cheaper and less illegal ways to do so

The BBC has used surveillance vans to catch unlicensed TV watchers in the past, but will probably use different tactics to enforce the new iPlayer rules.
Photograph: Ray Tang/REX

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Tales of vans driving around peeking into people’s homes to catch them watching the BBC without a TV licence have been a staple of the rightwing press for years (and more recently, an extremist wing of anti-TV licensing Twitter) but this weekend the Telegraph put an alarming new twist on the story.

“BBC vans to snoop on internet users” cried the headline, warning that from next month a fleet of vehicles will “fan out across the country capturing information from private Wi-Fi networks in hopes to ‘sniff out’ those who have not paid the licence fee”.

The story was based on a report published by the National Audit Office last month, which said the BBC had demonstrated its ability to detect people watching live programming (the Telegraph decided not to mention the reference to live viewing only) on a “range of non-TV devices”.

A “computer network expert” told the Telegraph that the Beeb might be deploying a modified version of a tactic known as “packet sniffing”, which looks at the nature of data passing through Wi-Fi networks without actually intercepting it. The expert claimed that iPlayer data could be modified to make it distinguishable from other traffic without actually looking at its contents.

The BBC issued a statement rebutting the Telegraph article (without naming it), saying that there had been “considerable inaccurate reporting this weekend about how TV Licensing will detect people breaking the law by watching BBC iPlayer without a licence”.

“While we don’t discuss the details of how detection works for obvious reasons, it is wrong to suggest that our technology involves capturing data from private Wi-Fi networks.”

But the BBC’s statement is ambiguous about its capabilities, and there’s an obvious reason for that. While it doesn’t want people to think it’s turning into Big Brother, it does want them to think it knows when you are watching BBC programming without a licence – especially when, from next month, you will be required to pay the £145.50 annual fee to legally watch catchup content as well as live programming.

However, carrying out the sort of mass surveillance suggested by the Telegraph is likely to be prohibitively expensive, technically challenging and quite possibly illegal.

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Besides, there are other ways for the BBC to tell who is watching without paying. It has ruled out combing its own records of computers that have logged in to iPlayer and matching those up to licences, but it is authorised to use anti-terror legislation – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – to target people it already suspects of watching without a licence. It could, in theory, use that authorisation to access internet records of which sites you have visited. Even if surveillance vans were used, a targeted approach, and one that didn’t monitor Wi-Fi traffic, would make more sense.

In the long run, a more elegant solution would be to require a code linked to your TV licence to access iPlayer.

Whatever it does come up with, the rationale is clear. The BBC says it already loses £150m a year to people who say they don’t need a TV licence because they only watch catchup, and with the number of households saying they don’t have a TV increasing each year, it needs to find some way of making sure people who consume its programmes any other way are paying. In short, we need people to believe the Beeb is watching – otherwise one day there might not be a BBC to watch.